Sustainable Management of River Oases along the Tarim River (WP 3.1)

The overarching goal of SuMaRiO is to support oasis management along the Tarim River under conditions of climatic and societal changes. A main result envisaged is to develop an indicator-based Decision Support System (DSS) that allows a Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) within regional planning. This SIA will take into account the perspectives of all relevant actors and consider relevant Ecosystem Services (ESS) in the problem field of land and water management in the Tarim River Basin. The perspectives will be obtained and analyzed through a transdisciplinary research process. Then, under given scenario assumptions, possible actions and their impacts are estimated. In the implementation phase, the goal is to train Chinese partners in the use of the English and Chinese DSS.  

Universität Hohenheim is involved in SuMaRiO with four Institutes, whereby the Institute of Agricultural Engineering works on two topics:

WP 3.1.1: Water Requirement and Water Quality on the Plot Scale

• Characterization and categorization of agricultural water use. Analysis of existing technology for water provision and distribution, as well as water management and availability in terms of quantity, quality and reliability
• Modeling of plant water requirement using CROPWAT considering salinity problems
• Modeling of leeching requirement for salinity management
• Development of a module to model plant water use under different scenarios as tool for optimization of water use efficiency (WUE), based on field experiments (see 3.1.2)

WP 3.1.2: Sensor controlled irrigation systems for water saving production

• Field experiments regarding biomass formation under different irrigation and deficit irrigation (DI) methods for model validation (see 3.1.1)
• Establishing of a threshold value for Crop water Stress Index (CWSI), based on leaf temperature monitoring by thermal imaging, as decision criterion for irrigation
• Application of sensors to control DI: reciprocally installed TDR-sensors and IR sensors to monitor CO2 efflux from the rootzone
• Optimization of water use by automation
• Technology transfer

Budget (Hohenheim insgesamt):  1.407.572 Euro